The meeting will be held at the drably named but NH Collection Madrid Eurobuilding hotel from May 8 to 11 2017.

The timing may be fortuitous for intercontinental travelers — it ends just a couple of days before the Domaining Europe event starts in Berlin, which is just a short flight away.

ICANN summits are intersessional meetings dedicated to particular constituencies within the ICANN community. The GDD Industry Summit caters to registries, registrars and others in the business of selling gTLD domains.

They’re less formal that ICANN’s regular public meetings, designed to enable engagement between participants and between participants and ICANN staff.

The 2016 meeting was held in Amsterdam this June, attracting about 400 attendees.

ICANN’s formal public meetings next year are slated for Copenhagen (March), Johannesburg (June) and Abu Dhabi (October).

Domain registry Radix has shamelessly jumped on the “mannequin challenge” meme bandwagon, with the release of video plugging its forthcoming .fun gTLD.

It’s quite slickly produced, on the face of it shot in a single unbroken take (though I suspect there are a few edits hidden in the motion blur), but the real fun for me, as someone who’s obviously been working alone from his mother’s basement for the last decade, is having a nosey around the office of a modern tech company.

Radix, it seems, names its meeting rooms after Harry Potter characters and festoons its walls with inspirational quotes from self-help books.

There are a few visual gags too. One employee has hit the bottom of a bottle of Jack Daniels, presumably celebrating the wish-fulfilling sales figures we see on another’s monitor.

NB: If you’re wondering why a respectable company would produce a video backed with profane, sexist and sexually explicit lyrics, a young person I know assures me that using Rae Sremmurd’s chart-topper “Black Beatles” as the soundtrack is a standard component of the mannequin challenge meme.

GoDaddy is to substantially increase the size of its European operation with the $1.79 billion acquisition of Host Europe Group.

The market-leading registrar confirmed yesterday earlier reports that it was on track to buy HEG, which counts several big-name British and German registrars among its brands.

The deal is worth €1.69 billion ($1.79 billion), which breaks down to €605 million to HEG shareholders and €1.08 billion in debt. It’s expected to close in the second quarter next year.

HEG’s domain brands include 123Reg and DomainMonster in the UK and DomainFactory in Germany.

The company says it has 1.7 million customers and manages over seven million domains.

But the acquisition is more concerned with HEG’s higher-margin small business hosting business, where the company has nine data centers in Europe and the US.

GoDaddy said in a press release:

Combining GoDaddy’s global technology platform with HEG’s footprint in Europe will enable the rapid deployment of a broader range of products to customers and allow for better scale of product development and go-to-market investments across both companies.

One part of the HEG business, the $92 million-a-year PlusServer, is likely to be sold off, however.

GoDaddy said that unit “serves larger, more mature companies that require a dedicated field sales force and account management”, which is not GoDaddy’s core strength.

The deal means that GoDaddy will become the owner of the annual NamesCon conference, which HEG picked up in August for an undisclosed amount.

The acquisition is unlikely to have closed before this coming January’s NamesCon, so there’s unlikely to be many obvious changes to the 2017 event.

GoDaddy said the acquisition is being financed by debt.

HEG’s current owner is private equity firm Cinven, which paid $545 million in 2013.

The Chinese government has granted licenses to operate in the country to its first tranche of new gTLDs — .vip, .club and .xyz.

The agreements mean that Chinese registrars will be able to give their Chinese customers the ability to actually use their domains for web sites.

It also means the companies will be obliged to censor domains the government does not like, but only those domains registered via Chinese registrars.

The Ministry of Industry and Information Technology announced the licenses, given to the Chinese subsidiaries of Minds + Machines, .CLUB Domains and XYZ.com respectively, today.

M+M CEO Toby Hall told DI that it’s “a great moment of support for Chinese registrars”, giving them a “very clear signal about which TLDs they can focus on”.

XYZ.com said in a blog post that some of its Chinese registrars (its biggest channel) are planning on offering discounts to celebrate the approval.

It’s always been possible for Chinese people to register new gTLD domains via Chinese registrars — it’s estimated that 42% of the 27 million new gTLD domains in existence today are Chinese-owned.

However, Chinese citizens need a government license if they want to launch a web site, and the government only issues licenses for domains in approved TLDs.

In addition to .cn and China-based gTLDs, which were the first to be given the nod, Verisign was approved earlier this year for .com.

Hall said that while .vip has been popular with Chinese domainers, the MIIT license means it can start to tap the small business market there too.

Obtaining the license means that the three registries, which are all based in the US or Europe, will have to comply with Chinese regulations when it comes to Chinese customers.

That basically means the Chinese government gets to censor pretty much anything it doesn’t like, up to and including sites that “spread rumors”.

Hall said that there’s no chance of this censorship bleeding out to affect non-Chinese customers.

M+M, along with XYZ and .CLUB, are using Chinese registry gateway ZDNS to act as a proxy between their own back-ends (Nominet for .vip, Neustar for .club and CentralNic for .xyz) and Chinese registrars.

“All of our Chinese web sites go through ZDNS, so only web sites going through ZDNS would be affected,” Hall said, referring to the censorship rules.

Hall added that he was “not aware” of there being a blocklist of politically sensitive strings that Chinese customers are not allowed to register.